Oscar-winning documentarian Daniel Roher (“Navalny“) makes his move into features with his accomplished debut “Tuner.” This engaging crowdpleaser first wowed audiences on the fall festival circuit and now hits theaters. A romantic thriller set in the New York music world, “Tuner” is taut as a drum. We know what octogenarian Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman (“Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Rain Man”) can do. But British actor Leo Woodall (“The White Lotus,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”) is a revelation as a piano virtuoso coping with a hearing affliction that makes him acutely sensitive to sound.
These days Niki (Woodall) works as a piano tuner, often in posh settings, with his 80ish boss Harry (Hoffman). On one job, he runs into some people who need to open a safe; his acute hearing allows him to easily crack it. He needs extra money, so he goes along with some petty thieves who hire him for more robberies. He also falls for a charming young pianist (Havana Rose Liu). The movie artfully combines a tight script, thoughtful mise-en-scène, and strong acting with complex sound design by Oscar winner Johnnie Burn (“Zone of Interest”). (He could earn more kudos for this.) But veteran producer JoAnne Sellar (“There Will Be Blood”) and screenwriter Robert Ramsey (“Intolerable Cruelty”) also played crucial roles.
When Roher won the Oscar at 29 for CNN Films’ “Navalny,” he had no idea what to do next. “It’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s amazing, it’s also fucking scary,” he said on Zoom. “How do you follow that up? People are coming up to me at fancy events saying, ‘Wow, you’re not going to top this, great work, kid,’ and I’m intimidated and anxious about the specter of this film looming over me, this phenomenal lightning-in-a-bottle accomplishment.”
Roher went back to documentaries with “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” at Focus Features and “Blink” at NatGeo. “I didn’t want to be defined by the Navalny film,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be the first sentence in my eulogy. I wanted it to exist as an incredible miracle in my life, but not something that would define me. And so the way I chose to cope with the overwhelming attention and success with that film was to try and do something completely different, and that’s why I turned my mind towards a fiction film, which has my dream since I was 13 years old. I hadn’t written a screenplay since I was 16 or 17, but worked up the courage.”
The filmmaker pursued documentaries after spending one day in a college film class at the Savannah College of Art and Design. “I walked into film school, and I looked around, and I saw 40 kids in a class,” he said. “‘No, this is not going to happen.’ It seemed intuitive to me that ‘I’m going off-road here. I’m going to try my own thing out and try and forge my own path.’”
“Tuner” was inspired by two things: falling in love with his wife, filmmaker Caroline Lindy (“Your Monster”), and her introduction to a piano tuner. “He goes from house to house, typically servicing wealthy homes in wealthy enclaves, and sometimes he’ll get a performance hall or a music studio,” said Roher. “The piano tuner is the bridge between the engineering and the art. Without a tuner, there is no music.” Roher followed him around for a day and wondered what criminal context a piano tuner might find himself in. “I had this rush of insight, maybe he can use the same skill to get a piano on pitch to crack a safe.”
Roher loves crime films. “A crime story is rich thematic soil,” he said, “What causes good people to do bad things, right? When is it okay to do something that’s bad for a good reason? It’s that Robin Hood thing that I’ve always been drawn to.”
Thus, Roher poured his own performance anxiety “into this piano virtuoso, who developed this horrible hearing condition, so he can’t play anymore, and instead has to spend his life in quiet servitude of these instruments.”
Of course, the pivotal thing was to create an inciting incident that propels the story without clunky exposition. “I wanted to try and figure out a circumstance to make it feel as natural as possible,” said Roher, “as visual as possible, and then, it’s the rush of insight: ‘Oh, I’m good at this. I didn’t know I had this skill.’ That’s a fun thing to have.”
Much like “Good Will Hunting,” you root for this gifted man to find his way. “It’s this sad genius burnout thing,” said Roher, “someone who has so many gifts, they’re overflowing, and it’s crushing him in a way.”
Roher wrote up a 90-page treatment “that looked more like a play than a movie,” he said, “and I brought it to my friend Rob Ramsey. He is a screenwriting professor at USC, and he agreed to help finish it. Rob hadn’t written a movie in a while. I was the guy who said, ‘Dust off your skates, we’re going back.’ He knows about structure and cadence and rhythm. As the director, I want to understand the flow of the movie, how the scenes move between one another, the ins and the outs, the transitions, because a good movie can be won or lost in the in-between, right? How does the film flow and fit together as a piece and cohesively?”
The challenge for “Tuner” was blending a sweet family story with a gritty crime story. “And you have this romance musical story,” said Roher. “That’s a lot to do, and it has to feel like one movie, and the same movie where it’s Dustin and Leo, slapstick, going about their day, kibitzing and telling jokes, that has to be the same movie as a guy who gets his head blown off.”
The script, originally set in Los Angeles, was sent to prospective backers accompanied by a 200-page coffee-table book. Then Roher got a call. “‘Hey, you can’t do it in LA, but if you change it to New York, you can make the movie,’” he said. He rewrote and storyboarded the entire script. After weeks of negotiating the budget ($7 million), Roher nabbed a green light from Black Bear.
Aided by casting director Deb Zane, the director went after his ensemble. They went to Oscar-winning octogenarian Hoffman and rising star Leo Woodall. Working with Hoffman was a challenge for someone who had never directed actors before. “Dustin showed up,” said Roher. “He was 87 when we shot that movie, which is extraordinary. And he and Leo are a study in contrast. Leo is comfortable with the script. Dustin is at his best when he’s improvising. I had to find the balance between them.”
With this role, Woodall plays someone “who’s withdrawn, who lives in insecurity, who’s trying his best to be okay in a challenging context,” said Roher. “What I found in Leo was someone who was charismatic, talented, and more than anything, he has this movie star quality where you see him and just want him to be OK. He has boyish charm mixed with deep melancholy.”
Roher knew Havana Rose Liu from her work in “Bottoms.” “She was the character: ambitious, committed, diligent, dialed in, a hard worker,” he said. “She learned those piano pieces for the movie. Leo himself, too; he learned all of that for the movie.”
Clearly, Roher is trying to give the audience a fun ride. “Some filmmakers make films for themselves,” he said. “And they are the intended audience, and it is for them, and they are not thinking about the audience, right? They’re thinking about themselves and what they want to see, what the best version of the movie is for them. I am obsessed with the audience. I am obsessed with the experience that the audience is going to have. I hold in high regard the privilege of someone giving me an hour and 45 minutes of their life. I cut the fat. I want it to be taut. I don’t want it to overstay its welcome, to leave them wanting more.”
Because “Tuner” is told from the point of view of the afflicted piano tuner, the soundscape of the film is complex. Sometimes he’s wearing muffling headphones. Others, he’s keenly listening to the pitch of the piano keys or the clicks of the safe he is cracking. That’s why Roher reached out to Burn.
“This is not loss of hearing,” said Roher. “This is a sensitivity to loud noises. This is a tinnitus. This is having to protect your ears from loud noises. We had to develop the subjective perspective of Leo in any environment, and that was a challenge because he has his little earplugs that are one level of protection, but then he goes outside, and he walks by a leaf blower, he pops on these big ones, and it’s alienating. Because he has to protect his ears, you can’t hear and be part of anything. And when I was interviewing people who have this hearing condition in real life, you learn how alienating it is. You can’t go sit in a bar, go watch a movie, go to a concert. Like, how do you date? Everything fun is loud. You meet him as a shell of his former self.”
Needless to say Roher was devastated, if not surprised, by Alexei Navalny’s death. “He died on February 17,” he said. “My son was born on January 23. I miss him. I’m writing a film about him, an action movie that’s an alternate history, where he’s not murdered in prison, he survives a super-soldier experiment, and he breaks out, and he goes on a revenge campaign. So, the first act is like ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ the second act is like ‘The Revenant,’ and the third act is ‘Kill Bill.’ It’s me via the mode of ‘Rambo’ coping with this profound grief, and exorcising, and getting to have all these conversations with him that I didn’t get to have. It’s a movie that’ll never get made, but the exercise of writing it has for me been an exercise in grief and in coping with that whole chapter, because it’s hard to cope with the whole thing: a crazy thing to have happen to anyone, and so I’m just trying to process it as best as I can and be grateful that I had that experience, because I met my wife through the promotion of the movie, and then we have our family, and it’s all because of Alexei. I think about him all the time. I miss him. I’m angry at him.”
Next up, Roher has started shooting Netflix’s “Positano” in Italy, with Matthew McConaughey and Zoe Saldaña in a story about two rival jewel thieves who meet on a job, cross paths, and have a negative interaction. “One of them gets away with the bag,” said Roher, “and then they’re forced to team up under challenging circumstances to pull off this big, big job.”
“Tuner” is now in theaters from Black Bear.
